Words: Helen Lord

You may have seen Phil and I entering Dragons’ Den on BBC One recently to present Rehome.co.uk. The BBC invited us onto the show, and we felt it was a great opportunity to highlight the importance of reuse and its role in creating a more sustainable future for our industry. We walked in proud and prepared.

We anticipated tough questions, we knew it would be challenging,  but what we didn’t anticipate was the invaluable business lesson we gained from the experience.

The show aired with a harsh edit (we spent over 2 hours in the Den), personal critiques, and lots of armchair critics on social media. But something valuable also happened: uncomfortable, direct scrutiny of decisions we had made. As business owners this is a rare gift indeed!  

In our case, the spotlight quickly turned to our IT systems, mainly the cost, and whether the investment was justified. It was not an easy conversation to have, especially when you’ve committed significant time and money to getting it right and followed the best advice available at the time.

But here is the smack of reality: “we’ve already invested, we have to make it work” is a critical warning sign.

Like most business owners, we made decisions on things we have no experience of. We backed our technology choice early, back in 2022, because we believed, following advice  it would give us the right functionality to support our vision. At the time, those decisions felt right. These were informed, considered, and supported by verified external advisors provided by funding.

But under the pressure of the Dragons asking simple, commercial questions, the cracks became visible and blindsided us: Was the platform right in 2026 and was it moving the business forward?

It’s not a complex question, but one that many businesses avoid asking once the time and money have been invested.

Another uncomfortable point raised was our reliance on advisors outside of our business. We collaborated with people who came recommended. We trusted their expertise.  Again, a completely normal approach and one taken across the KBB sector every day, whether it is IT, marketing, or operations. But here is the hardest lesson – A recommendation doesn’t come with accountability. This sits with the business owners. Did we push hard enough?  Had we questioned deeply enough? Had we stayed close enough to the detail?

It’s easy to outsource confidence along with the job to be done. Much harder to stay critically engaged throughout. But this is exactly what’s required.

For independent kitchen businesses, ours is a familiar story. You are balancing design, customer expectations, supply chains, margins, and increasingly, technology. You do not have the luxury of in-house experts in every field, so you bring people in.

But bringing people in should never mean stepping back. Our experience has reinforced something important: discomfort is where the real work happens. If no one is challenging your decisions, you are too comfortable. And comfort is dangerous! That doesn’t mean every criticism is correct. But the act of being challenged and sometimes rethinking is where the magic happens.

Most people will not experience the intensity of a Dragons’ Den pitch.  But that level of scrutiny shouldn’t be reserved for a TV show. It should be built into the way you run your business.

What’s changed for us moving forward is we now challenge ‘ourselves’, no matter how uncomfortable, or trusted the advice we receive. Asking harder questions, staying closer to the detail, and keeping accountability firmly with us. We have grown as business owners and Rehome will be stronger as a result.

We went into the Den to raise awareness. What we left with was something arguably more valuable: perspective. The kind that only comes when someone looks at your business from the outside and asks, “Why?”

It is a question every business owner should get used to answering.